“Start decoupling your identity from the underlying implementations today,” Eschenauer says. “This is the first step to free yourself from the corporate silos controlling your data and identity.” His own private email address previously forwarded to a Gmail address, but that made it easy to switch email implementations.

As much as I care about data privacy, I’m not so paranoid that I feel I need to disconnect from Google (or Facebook, or Apple…) but I do like to know my options. They’re bleak. Most people don’t have the means or the know-how to create a private cloud on a hosted server. Even using an email address on your own domain can create vulnerabilities, as Naoki Hiroshima discovered.

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Senior managers are the worst information security offenders, according to Stroz-Friedberg (PDF).

Senior management—those who often have high levels of access to valuable company information—admitted to partaking in risky behaviors most readily.

This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen this many times, and have heard horror stories from friends who work in infosec. I am surprised that we haven’t heard that a senior-level executive was the initial point of access for a major breach. It’s only a matter of time.

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Every day opportunities are missed, little bits of value are lost, customers become unentranced. We don’t notice so much, because hey, there’s a profit. Profit covers many sins. Of course, one day, once the foundation is rotted and the support is gone, so is the profit. Suddenly, apparently quite suddenly, it all falls apart.

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…there are methods of inferring what devices are being used in a home at a given moment. It’s an aspect of “non-intrusive load monitoring”, whereby the energy signatures of individual devices like your washing machine or TV can be picked up as part of the overall energy input to the house.

Researchers in 2011 were even able to use a similar approach to determine what movie was being watched on a television set by making energy profiles of each film. This was achieved by observing that a television’s electricity load will vary over time depending on whether dark or light scenes are being displayed to the viewer.

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I see a surprising number of marketing plans with “go viral” as a strategic pillar. This is magical thinking at its worst. Here are sage words from Upworthy, who are arguably the masters of viral content.

Unless you harness the magical powers of a unicorn horn, you will never know how to make all your stuff go totally viral.

This isn’t about editorial guidelines—it’s about security. Yahoo should treat this like any other security incident and explain what happened, what they’re doing to fix it, and what European consumers can do protect themselves. That would be one step that Yahoo can take to shift from complexity to clarity.